Amid the constant froth of “how the internet has transformed our lives, and ohmygod the robots are coming!” chatter, it’s occasionally worth reflecting on the things that could have changed but haven’t, or haven’t much. Take the scholarly article; yes, we can all access things so much more easily (provided we have the institutional support that gives us access to JSTOR), which is generally fabulous, and it’s becoming a reflex to remember to worry about Open Access issues, at least for those us in the UK worrying about whether our publications will be able to ‘count’ for the purposes of the Research Excellence Framework hoop-jumping exercise – but the article itself hasn’t dramatically changed in decades, and nor have the journals that might publish it (even something completely online like Histos otherwise more or less replicates the format of a traditional journal). Of course this is at least partly a consequence of working in a humanities discipline; for the most part we don’t have large quantities of supporting data that isn’t accessible elsewhere, so the possibility of uploading masses of supplementary material doesn’t mean as much to us as it does to those working in other fields.
But it clearly is the case that the form of the scholarly article could have changed more than it has – to the point where we might suspect the inertia might have something to do with those same research quality evaluation processes, as (a) everyone knows what they’re doing with a traditional article, and it suits reviewers to evaluate content and argument rather than having to think about form as well (yes, Hayden White fans, of course there’s the Content of the Form to worry about, but if everyone in a discipline follows the same principles this can be discounted, and (b) no one wants to risk crashing and burning by trying something even slightly new or experimental.
Obviously I find this sort of conservatism lamentable, and so it’s been an enormous pleasure to watch the development of Epoiesen, the brainchild of Shawn Graham at Carleton, which has now gone live and will be officially launched later this month. Describing itself as “a journal for creative engagement in history and archaeology”, this is exciting and original in at least two respects: firstly, its emphasis on new forms of engagement with the past, especially digital means – in other words, it’s pushing people to take full advantage of the fact that it’s an online publication – and secondly, the way that it replaces traditional blind, anonymous and hidden peer review with the publication of responses alongside the article, commenting and criticising it as appropriate but also using it as a springboard to further exploration.
Basically, you need to go and read it all as a matter of urgency, to get a fabulous sense of sheer possibility – there are explorations of the relationship between art and archaeology through maps and other depictions of road networks, a game that takes you through the existential torture of academic publishing, another game that explores the whole question of anachronism and the reshaping of history in memory, the record of a Twitter conference and the issues it raised, and an account of an engagement project around archaeology and heritage in the Middle East and North Africa, all with equally fascinating and thought-provoking responses.
The problem with Epoiesen is that it makes a lot of the rest of what we do seem, well, rather stale and unexciting. I suppose that one reason I’ve welcomed this project so enthusiastically is that I was already thinking of different ways of presenting and exploring my research on Thucydides – the still-in-development-sorry Melian Dialogue game, the ideas I’m developing for a public event in November as part of the UK’s Being Human festival of the humanities (watch this space), and some even wackier ideas. I can immediately recognise Epoiesen as somewhere I could seek to publish this stuff – if only I had the time to devote to it, rather than the bread-and-butter publications that I ought to be getting on with. So, I feature in this opening issue (not really the right word; salvo? manifestation?) just as a respondent, to Lucas Coyne’s interesting use of a Twine time travel game to explore issues of anachronism and contingency – which was great fun, and not too much of a distraction.
Heaven only knows how such experimental pieces would be evaluated for monitoring and disciplinary purposes – presumably there are people in Visual Arts and the like who could offer us some advice? It’s a bit of a paradox; on the one hand, if such outputs could stand a decent chance of ‘counting’ then we could feel less guilty about devoting time to them (in the same way, I suppose, as blogging and other forms of engagement currently operate as supplements, even if desirable supplements encouraged by the powers that be, to ‘regular’ academic activity, rather than as a valuable replacement for some of it) – but I guess they would then lose some of their charm as a daring alternative, a creative and intellectual space free from the usual constraints and anxieties – as a form of play rather than work.
Maybe this is the future. It’s certainly a future, and an incredibly inspiring one. Seriously, people, you need to check this out: a new space for unrestrained scholarly creativity.
On occasion, I have the alloyed pleasure of reading industrial-psychology papers. They have changed tremendously over the last 20 years, not for the better. My best guess is that they’re primarily written to be catalogued by an artificial intelligence. Human readers are optional, if we are even desirable. I am pleased to make the acquaintance of Epoiesen as a counterweight.
Two observations:
(1) as an author: if it’s peer reviewed and has a DOI, then its form is irrelevant. What matters is that the DOI maps to something that your local evaluation framework counts. It’s databases all the way down, after all…
(2) “Responses” being included in your RQE exercise may not be that far away. Last week I reviewed a paper for a journal outside my usual circuit; Wiley asked me whether I wanted to add the review to Publons, which is a recording tool for reviews. The Publons initiative has 4-5 of the larger science publishers on board. Elsevier, it seems, have their own competing reviewer recognition system. It won’t be technically difficult to start harvesting this information and adding it into institutions’ scores. Perhaps you can persuade the editors of Epoiesen to get ahead of the game?
(via lurking at Crooked Timber…)